It feels pointless to try and rip original games for use in RA. Set developers are very arbitrary in what ROM they end up developing for, and back when I used RA, I felt like I had to manually look up each potential game I wanted to play to see what version they wanted. There are vague guidelines, but zero site enforcement, for what ROMs are supposed to be used for set development.

Sometimes they develop for a PAL region because PAL releases often have multi language support. Other times NSTC/J releases were preferred for having less glitches, or glitches that they consider fun and fundamental to the proper experience of the game. Same reason is used for developing/only using specific revisions of a game. And then sometimes they just end up making RA specific patched versions. Maybe the base game has a completion tracker that isn’t actually completable, so instead of treating the original bugged value as the true 100% in the vanilla game, they force you to use a modded copy. Or perhaps the the game has a exploitable glitch that makes achievement creation pointless, since you could always “cheat” them. So they mod/patch the glitch out instead of adding a glitch check into the achievement completion logic.

So exactly how long do you think you are supposed to stay silent before the cops decide your magically free to go, or in your fantasy land, they begrudgingly let you speak to a lawyer? Is it before or after the wrench method of obtaining passwords comes into play?

I’m curious why you would be interested in public groups on Simplex? Its great for direct messages and small friend/invite only groups. But what would you gain in terms of privacy with public groups? If the challenge to entry is “click this public invite link”, you should assume bots are joining and scraping anything with triple digit member counts. If your threat model is focused on corporate surveillance, public group chats aren’t that much different than community forums that lack a bot friendly API for scraping. Which is to say, very easy to scrape still if anyone actually cares to.

As others have mentioned, the moderation tools are basically nonexistent and bigotry runs rampant. Even if you try to organize alternative groups to the Nazi bars, you will not have any tools to stop organized harassment.

An alternative view point : https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n13/jon-day/the-beautiful-ones

The accuracy of Calhoun’s observations about rat sociology, still less their relevance to human society, remains a matter of debate. Even at the time he was criticised for the methodologies of his experiments (one colleague at NIMH told him that ‘there are so many variables in your research that you can’t possibly draw any conclusions about anything’).

Many of the behaviours he considered ‘aberrant’ – cannibalism, aggression, homosexual mating – are not uncommon in rodent society. As both books acknowledge, his experiments have never been successfully replicated by other researchers, and wild colonies of rats don’t seem to display any of the personality types he so vividly described. He rarely published in mainstream scientific journals, saying that his concerns were so pressing that he didn’t have time to wait for peer review.

It seems plausible that Calhoun was responsible for creating the conditions for population collapse. He only cleaned out Universe 25 every six to eight weeks; disease and parasitism could account for many of the phenomena he thought were due to mere proximity. It can’t have helped that, other than the ladders and ramps, the Universes didn’t provide much in the way of stimulation. Calhoun thought of his rat cities as utopias, but they seem more like well-stocked prisons. No wonder they didn’t bring out the best in the inmates.

I generally raise eye brows any time the dangers of overpopulation come up, as it always a concern of eugenicists. These sorts of research studies are constantly looking for data that confirms beliefs they already held, and they never want to look any further in what the root causes are. The foregone conclusion is always demanding population control, followed with the healthy dose of “I’m just asking questions!”.

Edit: Deleted old comment, was a bit much to say; it already looked bad and the AI made it look worse. Why do it? Just keep the old native res release up. No one asked for a AI upscale.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one. The developer mentions the idea of having “expected time to complete” featured on the Steam Store page, and using that as an exception for 2 hour refund periods. But he also says he intended this Paddle game to be between 3-4 hours long. He was already aware of the problem of short games on Steam, made efforts to avoid it, and still missed the mark. By his own admission, his game would not meet his own recommended refund exception.

He also blames speed runners as a general player type that is causing this abuse, but the way he speaks of them sounds like he is implying that it is a concentrated community effort. Now, I haven’t checked speed running community discussions or watched any YouTuber’s talk about this game. I could imagine some not so well thought out “influencer” talking about this games short run time, and their audience turning it into a novel blind speed run challenge. That would hypothetically be some real shit head behavior, and the best course of action would be for speed running communities to take some moderation action against people who post their times but refund/remove the game from their libraries.

But I don’t think Valve should change their refund policy over this. There are games with much shorter completion run times that don’t get refunded. Including linear, narrative focused games comparable to Paddle Paddle Paddle. The developer even mentions that despite the large amount of refunds, this game got a much larger reception and net profit than other titles. Its an easy assumption to make that the social advertising of being a gimmicky speed run caused its financial success. 1/4th of the sales are refunded, but the total sales dwarf many of the countless indie titles that drown at launch.

Idk. I can think of 10 games in my library off the top of my head, that I completed in less than 2 hours but didn’t feel like refunding. “They beat my game and still refunded it” isn’t a valid problem to the no questions asked refund policy. People get refunds for things besides games for much less time and more money spent. Hell, it doesn’t even seem like he has any negative consequences to these refunds! The game is at positive reviews, its not algorithmicly being suppressed over the refunds, he’s making the same “ratio” of profit as he would without the refunds; what is the actual problem here???

I feel like this meme being originally from an autism community, posted outside of it without that context, has lead to some egregiously bad takes in the comments. Unfortunately ironic. People coming in here having no idea what the autistic experience of people giving vague instructions and then just assuming you will figure stuff out is like. And then the reverse; trying your best to explain a process in hopes that there will be no ambiguity, only to be accused of being condescending.

And of course we have a plethora of “well in this edge case, its actually necessary to not question instructions!” takes, as if we are talking about last minute bomb defusals, instead of everyday office procedure or insensitive social situations. People on the spectrum are a great showcase of how unwilling the average person is to question the status quo.

How do you get “willfully disregarding procedure or instruction” out of “I ask why, and if I don’t get an answer, I don’t do it”? Did this nuclear facility want people who didn’t care to understand the procedures they were told to comply with???

Mother fucker, I guarantee you the only people who are obsessive enough to enforce this shit are on the spectrum themselves. Autistic people aren’t selfishly stupid. They want clear reasoning so they don’t make mistakes from assumptions.

A common issue autistic people have is with “implied authority”, which has the same main issue as social cues. Doing things because “that’s how its always been”. A manager who has a job due to nepotism and a common courtesy that is just a white lie are going to cause the same kind of rage in an autist. If it can’t be explained in a way that is logical and fair, they will not have any patience for it.

This meme is not about anarchists.

If its autonomous enough that it gives you pause about whether your account is bot enough for a label or not, why not just make a separate Lemmy account for it? Clearly it would be perceived as a bot account if it didn’t have your regular posting on it as well, no matter how well you manually curate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicidal_empathy

Its being used as a new coat of paint for Great Replacement theory, “we must look out for our own”, etc. Trying to guilt trip people for having empathy for minorities and suggesting that assissting the poor, homeless, disabled, etc will destroy modern civilization.

So the usual fascist/imperialist talking points that have been around for over a millennium. I’ll be honest, its the first I’ve heard of it and decided to look it up, because the phrase by itself conveyed nothing to me personally.

If its bad for kids, its bad for adults too. Age restrictions don’t address the emotional manipulation systems at hand with corporate social media, and societal well being is obviously not what the state is concerned with anyway.

The removal of online privacy is the only goal.

You don’t use much social media, then? Is this a joke? Its literally a twitter screenshot lol.

Lemmy noticeably has very little queer horny posting. I feel like even Tumblr, with its site wide porn ban, is more publicly horny than Lemmy.

Historically, Valve has hired lawyers to weasle out of legal responsibilities around the world, to limited success. They repeatedly tried to get out of legally mandated refunds for digital goods in several western nations, and now people think that Valve is the good guys for eventually capitulating like it was their idea in the first place.

I cannot imagine a scenario where Gabe Newell would hire a lawyer just to have him say “comply with the new laws instead of fighting back”.

EDIT: Just cause I felt like it made for more present context, Valves legal team clearly isn’t going to take the “maybe we should ban loot boxes as a form of online gambling targeted towards children” debate lying down. You mess with Valve’s sources of revenue, they will pull out every possible slime ball argument to say they are legally allowed to piss over any and all consumer rights. Gabe’s not about to allow porn to be banned on his store of “digital game license’s where you don’t own anything actually”. Not until the legal situation gets so dire that porn isn’t worth attempting to profit off anymore. He has fought far more tasteless battles in his career.

I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.

I don’t typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don’t have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection… Hate speech isn’t currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?

Pretty sure they can’t close the forums, actually. I’ve never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven’t even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn’t have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?

The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.

Have you noticed any change in battery performance on BasicSync? I’ve been thinking about switching over; aside from the poor dev transition/communication, the new version by ResearchXXL started chewing through my battery life. Used an older version of the app and confirmed that it used less energy, but was too concerned about possible security exploits in what is a very popular p2p application with extensive file permissions…

Why do you think a client should have to download a dark mode CSS separately? Have you put any thought into why that is treated as a separate request, rather than a function of an existing page that could be switched between offline without any acknowledgement sent from the client?

Web standards have been butchered to force these constant validation measures for the sole purpose of telemetry/spyware. A client should be able to render a web page however the fuck it wants and the server that sent the page should be none the wiser.

And what of things like battery status? That has no legitimate purpose at all. No web site is going to change its behavior in response to your battery status, but current charge % and battery wear stats alone are enough to perfectly distinguish your mobile device from anyone else that you would be sharing a IP address with.

I can hate them both. 90% of this info has no legitimate reason to leave the clients machine. In a world where open source development is still legal and available, I don’t see why its so hard to have a web browser that doesn’t broadcast every single hardware detail about your machine.

I hate how this situation is spoken about as a lost cause. People in the comments section here are acting like this information is required for the web to work at all. Probably weren’t alive at a time where websites could be stored offline because they didn’t expect constant client validation. Multiple comments acting like light/dark mode requires a server request, and couldn’t just be handled offline by the clients browser choosing how to render stuff after its been downloaded. Bet they think the web server needs to know the time zone too.

So that you can run interactive 3D applications like games in your browser.

Hardware info does not need to be sent server side to accomplish this. OpenGL and Vulkan APIs can both say what the current hardware supports without hardware identifiers. A malicious website could probably still fingerprint based off those listed features, but that’s just a justification for “don’t accept requests for GPU hardware acceleration without user permission”. Currently modern web browsers broadcast it no matter what the page is requesting.

To adjust the performance of a web application to save more power.

Name me one web “page” that does this. A web “application” doesn’t count. My native browser should should never broadcast this, ever.

To give you matching website.

Can/should be ran client side.

Again to adjust performance or to pause an application.

Can/should be ran client side. Its none of the websites/applications business whether I have frozen its process or not.

Is often used to give you a download link that matches your OS.

A small quality of life, isn’t worth it. Thankfully its the easiest thing to fake/lie about on this list. Most of these “features” on this list are not user facing and cannot be turned off with basic configurations.